(June 23, 2015 at 8:22 am)loganonekenobi Wrote:(May 15, 2015 at 5:11 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: I'm a Catholic. You have questions. Let's get started.
The greatest fear I have is that with enough consent we in this country may return to a theocracy that although brought us out of the fall of the roman empire did much atrocity to the world in the name of God. Do you believe that today if that happened I and other non believers would have much hope for a life in this country?
The Catholic Church didn't do any such thing, it actually destroyed innumerable relics and books from the Classical world as "demonic idols" and "textbooks of demonology". It seperated us from our classical past, until it suited itself of course and during the reneissance the Papacy got a taste for the classics again.
No, what dragged us out of medevalism was the fall of Byzantium and the transport of huge quantities of classical Greek literature and artefacts back into the west. The beautiful irony however is that the Catholic Church could have prevented that even still! Firstly if it hadn't weakened Byzantium by taking it over and briefly setting up a Latin Patriarchate, and secondly if they'd actually given any more help than a token gesture of 300 Pisan archers to defend Constatinople!
The Catholic Church did give us a few things we take for granted today like Charity, many Romans before then practiced what the Catholics call "vainglory"; setting up huge monuments to their own fame rather than feeding the poor but leaving the Dark Ages? Irish Celtic Christianity did a hell of a lot more there, in fact they created many of the monasteries the Catholics like to claim as their own today.